Usually, an automatic machine for making filter-paper pods, containing doses of infusion product comprises a production line having a plurality of operating stations located one after the other along it and at the end of which a continuous strip of pods, that is to say, two superposed webs of filter paper heat sealed to each other and having interposed, at regular intervals, a plurality of infusion product charges, is divided up at a cutting station into individual single-use pods separated by waste material.
Downstream of the cutting station, the pod making machine has an end outfeed station equipped with pick and place means designed for picking up the pods one by one and placing them on conveyors that transport them to packaging units which wrap them in respective heat-sealed overwraps. In another solution, which this invention specifically refers to, the outfeed station comprises handling means for stacking groups of pods and transporting the pod stacks to a packaging unit where each pod stack is picked up and fed by a multiplicity of complex mechanical devices into a forming assembly which packs it into a bag-like packets.
For example, in a prior art solution described in International Patent Application PCT WO 99/37542, the pods are packaged by placing two or more pod stacks in a carriage mounted on a conveyor track. The carriage transports the stacks to a remote packaging station equipped with suitable means for picking up one or more pod stacks from the carriage and placing them in a packet previously opened at the top. The packet is then closed by suitable sealing means and transported to outfeed reservoirs.
In other words, packaging stacked groups of pods requires conveyor means for handling and moving the pods from the machine that makes them to the packaging unit, which is often located some distance away.
Structures of this kind have considerable disadvantages due not only to the presence of the handling/conveyor means required to transport the stacked pods to the packaging units, which greatly increase the overall dimensions of the pod making machines that mount them, but also and above all to the complexity of the components of the packaging units themselves, such as, in the aforementioned international PCT patent application, the conveyor carriages, the guide tracks for the carriages and the pod pick and place means.
Other major difficulties are caused by the handling and positioning of the pod stacks since the pods are gravity fed into the bags leading to their being incorrectly arranged in the bags.
The present invention has for an object to overcome the above mentioned disadvantages by providing an infusion pod making machine equipped with a built-in packaging unit and combining high productivity and quality pod packaging capabilities in a compact structure.